I-130 Total Wait Reaches 201 Days, Up 32% From a Year Ago

I-130 petitions approved the week of Sep 28 waited a median of 201 days from the date USCIS received the case to approval, compared with 152 days the same week last year, a difference of 49 days (+32.2%). As of Oct 5, 750,928 cases remain pending across all filing months, up 20,103 from 730,825 counted 28 days earlier. Every wait figure in this brief is computed from cases that have already been approved; none of them describes how long those 750,928 pending cases have waited.

The spread around this week's median is wide. The 25th percentile (p25) sat at 128 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 382 days, a gap of 254 days between the faster and slower quarters. Twenty-seven percent of approved cases (1,521 of 5,605 with a known filing date) waited more than a year. Applicants at different positions in the queue are having meaningfully different experiences.

Over the last 12 weeks, total-wait medians ranged from 180 days (the week of Jul 20) to 221 days (Aug 17), with this week's 201 coming down 15 days from last week's 216. The series oscillates without a clean upward or downward trend: a down week is typically followed by a flat or up week. Every reading over this period sits well above comparable weeks from a year ago, which tracked in the low-to-mid 150s. The week-over-week drop to 201 days does not yet indicate a sustained reversal.